Parties, procedures, and agendas: Institutional choice and congressional decision-making

Political parties and institutional choices about procedural arrangements and agenda formation are some of the more heavily studied aspects of the United States Congress. Parties have persisted as organizational units since the early congresses, leading generations of scholars to explore the effects of political parties on the behavior of individual members and congressional outputs more broadly. Scholars have also long understood the critical role that procedural details, such as a germaneness rule in the House and unlimited debate in the Senate have on policy outcomes. Similarly, the large number of actors combined with availability of data in "machine-readable" form have led scholars to do extensive work with the congressional roll call record. Measures of roll call votes such as the Rice index and party voting, as well as more sophisticated scaling analyses have allowed scholars to discover patterns and alignments in roll call voting.; What is largely absent from the literature on congressional decision-making are studies that link institutional features of Congress to aggregate patterns in roll call voting. As Morton (1999) argues, making inferences from empirical data requires that the analyst understand and evaluate the role of the data generating process. This dissertation will take a step in this direction by demonstrating that the choice of institutional features in Congress shapes the observed data on decision-making in critical ways. The three essays contained within demonstrate the important role that institutional choice and procedural context play in making inferences from the roll call record on topics such as party effects in roll call voting, the manner by which bills get to the House floor, and comparisons of House and Senate behavior over time.